Mobile devices often provide various mapping related features such as displaying a map view and allowing a user to interact with the displayed map view through, for example, a touch screen. One manner in which a user interacts with a map view is through gesture input to zoom in, zoom out, tilt, pan, or rotate the map view. Traditional mapping applications operable on mobile devices receive raster image data for a given map region of a map view. However, in the case of processing a gesture, raster data is limited in that a traditional mapping application on a mobile device is only responsive to the exact parameters of gesture input. In other words, because any given point within a raster image is indistinguishable from any other given point in the raster image, the mapping application is unable to discern additional information regarding the intent of a gesture based on component elements of a map view.